‘Sex and the City’ Author Regrets Not Having Kids: I Felt ‘Truly Alone’

An author who helped usher in a new era of sexual liberation admits that not building a family made her feel “truly alone.”

Candace Bushnell’s novel, “Sex and the City,” helped spawn the wildly popular HBO series of the same name, in which a group of affluent Manhattan women experience the joys and pratfalls of sexual independence. Speaking with the Sunday Times, however, Bushnell said she regrets not having children prior to her divorce in 2012.

When I was in my 30s and 40s, I didn’t think about it,” Bushnell said, according to Fox News. “Then when I got divorced and I was in my 50s, I started to see the impact of not having children and of truly being alone. I do see that people with children have an anchor in a way that people who have no kids don’t.” …

Moving on:

Bushnell said the lives of 50-something women have changed drastically over the decades and are virtually the same as women in their 20s.

“It didn’t used to be this way. At one time, 50-something meant the beginning of retirement — working less, spending more time on your hobbies, with your friends, who like you were sliding into a more leisurely lifestyle,” said Bushnell. “In short, retirement age folks weren’t meant to do much of anything but get older and a bit heavier. They weren’t expected to exercise, start new business ventures, move to a different state, have casual sex with strangers, and start all over again. But this is exactly what the lives of a lot of 50- and 60-something women look like today, and I’m thrilled to be reflecting the rich complexity of their reality on the page and now on the screen.”

Isn’t feminism wonderful?

Our society currently encourages smarter women to have careers rather than kids, so collectively we become dumber and less able to sustain our technology and our democracy, or to defend ourselves in this world. It’s not sustainable.